Is the Google Brand Update Really a Good Thing?

Early in 2009 Google announced that they would be commencing a brand update, which gave authority sites much more power and rankings in the SERP's. This has now also filtered through to the UK market. But is it really a good thing? Or have Google made a big mistake?

I understand why Google have done this, it is to deliver results that are clean and tidy to the user, they want to deliver sites that they can trust and know that these sites will not spam the index in any way (in theory). But is this the easy choice and easy way out for them? Sometimes I think that SEO has become so vast and so well evolved that Google are running out of ideas of how to keep up with it and how to actually rank the sites.

A huge proportion of the algo is reliant of links. Links have become so valuable and they are flying all over the place. There are so many sites that are now in the Top 10 that really do not deserve to be there? Or do they? Personally the reason I write this article is because in some ways I think that the brand update is wrong. I mean why should a company that has expanded itself offline and become a brand deserve to have the best rankings if they have neglected their sites design, structure and online promotion?

The way I see it is if small businesses are working on their sites day in day out, cleaning their code, optimising their content, fixing their structure and going out and getting links, then good on them, they are the ones who deserve to have rankings because they have put the effort in. It's just the way business works, whoever puts the most effort in gets the most out of it.

Again as an example if we take a look at the automobile sector you will notice that Google have now brought in all of the manufacturers such as ford, Volkswagen, fiat, Toyota, Audi and many more, and if you look at all of their sites the SEO is shocking.

A lot of people are asking how Google class a brand, personally I think it may be a manual tweak and it literally would not be that hard. Taking the car sector into account again, how many manufacturers are there? Not that many, so what Google are doing is giving them the rankings that they do not deserve.

I personally think the brand update was an easy solution for Google, they have done this to tidy up the results, but maybe they are going to lose out by choosing to go down this route. They should instead be employing actual SEO's, who work on sites everyday to see how to analyse linking patterns. It seems as though they do not have a clue what methods people are using, because if they did all it would take is a bit of programming to clean up a lot of the results.